Climate change impacts on wildfires in a Mediterranean environment

• DOI: 10.1007/s10584-014-1183-3
• Publication Date: 2014-07-01T22:20:31Z
• Authors: Marco Turco; Maria-Carmen Llasat; Jost von Hardenberg; Antonello Provenzale
• Keywords: Regional impact scenarios; Forest fires; 13. Climate action; Mediterranean ecosystems; 11. Sustainability; Climate change; 15. Life on land; 7. Clean energy; 01 natural sciences; Climate change; Regional impact scenarios; Forest fires; Mediterranean ecosystems; Regional i; 0105 earth and related environmental sciences

©<2014>. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This document is the, Accepted, version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Climatic Change. To access the final edited and published work see: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1183-3<br/>We analyse the observed climate-driven changes in summer wildfires and their future evolution in a typical Mediterranean environment (NE Spain). By analysing observed climate and fire data from 1970 to 2007, we estimate the response of fire number (NF) and burned area (BA) to climate trends, disentangling the drivers responsible for long-term and interannual changes by means of a parsimonious Multi Linear Regression model (MLR). In the last forty years, the observed NF trend was negative. Here we show that, if improvements in fire management were not taken into account, the warming climate forcing alone would have led to a positive trend in NF. On the other hand, for BA, higher fuel flammability is counterbalanced by the indirect climate e↵ects on fuel structure (i.e. less favourable conditions for fine-fuel availability and fuel connectivity), leading to a slightly negative trend. Driving the fire model with A1B climate change scenarios based on a set of Regional Climate Models from the ENSEMBLES project indicates that increasing temperatures promote a positive trend in NF if no further improvements in fire management are introduced.<br/>